Sleep apnea is a common sleep disorder characterized by abnormal breathing during sleep. Pauses in breathing for people with sleep apnea can last from a few seconds to minutes during sleep, often resulting in significant levels of sleep disturbance, which may result in daytime fatigue, impaired reaction time, vision problems, and impaired daytime cognition.
Sleep apnea is often treated with a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device. CPAP devices prevent reduction of oxygen levels in the blood and sleep loss by delivering a stream of pressurized air through a hose to a nasal pillow or a full face mask surrounding a patient's nose. The CPAP devices work by applying a mild air pressure on a continuous basis to keep a patient's airways continuously open at a prescribed pressure for each patient, to maintain unobstructed breathing throughout a sleep period, with patient initiated breaths.
While CPAP treatment can be a highly effective treatment for sleep apnea, a major downside with CPAP treatment is non-compliance. Patients are often reluctant to continuously use CPAP devices, as cleaning maintenance of CPAP devices have proved to be tiring and difficult for users because of bacterial buildup, which requires continuous cleaning and prevention steps. When users are away from home or traveling, cleaning of CPAP devices is even more difficult and cleaning compliance is less regular for users who are frequently travelling, such as truck drivers, pilots and business people with a heavy travel schedule. Most manufacturers of CPAP devices recommend that users perform daily and weekly cleaning of their machines to prevent bacteria and mold buildup. In this instance, each part of the CPAP device needs to be cleaned individually, including the mask, the hoses and the humidification portion, which is difficult and time consuming for users on a daily or weekly basis particularly when a user is travelling. Other CPAP device cleaning methods include soaking the component parts of a CPAP device in a mixture of vinegar and water to disinfect the component parts. Because of the inherent nature for CPAP devices to collect bacteria and mold, a number of other products are available to consumers to make CPAP machines safer, including but not limited to:
Citrus II Cleaning Spray for masks and tubing, available at www.cpapxchange.com
Contour CPAP cleaning wipes
CPAP tube cleaning brushes, available at www.cpapxchange.com
CPAP Guardian, available at www.cpapguardian.com
Further, several patents and patent applications have been filed on CPAP devices, improvements and the like. The patents in the field of CPAP devices include U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,845,350, 7,676,276, 6,276,304, 7,527,603, 7,767,168, 6,280,633, 7,022,225, 4,787,980 and US application numbers: 20100111792, 20060130834, 20040251125, 20050186108.
While some of the existing products, patents and applications described above refer to CPAP systems, methods and devices, there is no system, method or apparatus shown that covers the need to have an ozone system to sanitize, disinfect and clean a CPAP device and the inside of its component parts in a battery operated compact travel device that is easy to use while travelling, for ease of use and improved compliance of users, as described in accordance with the present invention.
Other systems, methods, apparatus features, and advantages of the present invention will be or become apparent to one with skill in the art upon examination of the following drawings and detailed description. It is intended that all such additional systems, methods, apparatus features, and advantages be included within this description, be within the scope of the present invention, and be protected by the accompanying claims.